Top o’ the Mornin’ to Ya!
TLDR: Saying “I am angry” makes anger your identity. Saying “I feel angry” makes it information you can examine. One simple word shift changes everything.
Stress, anxiety, anger, sadness, fear, hurt, guilt—all those are examples of emotions. And emotions can be devastating. They can be overpowering. They can be big. They can even take over your identity. I think part of the identity crisis is when we take things and turn them into an identity when they are not our identity.
God calls Himself the I Am and He stops there. And there’s so much importance to that state of being, of being I Am. We are created in His image. So we are I Am as well. The problem with those emotions is when we turn them into our identity and remove them from the position of being information.
The Bible talks about emotions and feelings being the great deceiver that erupt out of the heart and can deceive us and confuse us and send us in the wrong direction. So if we’re careful, I heard this on Christian radio this morning, if we’re careful to not say our emotions in the form of an identity statement, we can look at them objectively and figure out what the information is. What’s the message that’s trying to be delivered to me?
Instead of saying “I am angry,” that’s an identity statement. If instead we say “I feel angry. I feel stressed. I feel anxious,” that separates it from us and our identity. That’s a faster way to overcome these challenges of stress, anxiety, anger, sadness, fear, hurt, guilt, shame. Those are all feelings, and they’re caused by something. And separating them from our identity is healthy and strong and the path to the next level of understanding and overcoming them.
When we attach them to our identity, “I am stressed,” it’s like you can’t get rid of the stress because that’s what you am. So the healthiest step right here is feel those emotions. That’s the first step in the whole flow of everything in life because your emotions lead to your beliefs, which lead to your actions, which lead to your results. And your results provide new emotions. Feel the emotion as separate from you.
But you can’t have new emotions if your emotion is your identity, if that’s your identity. I am angry, I am sad, instead… I feel sad, and now we’re in a position of what am I sad about? What are the results that have caused my sadness? What were the actions that caused those results? We can do that by shifting “am” to “feel”. Be still (stop striving) and know that I am God.
And that being still is a way to have your identity in Christ, in God, in the Holy Spirit that fills us (if you’re Christian. If you’re not Christian, get on a call with me and let’s talk about that).
When my identity is in Christ and in God and in creation, God created me, and these emotions are there, they’re information, they’re information sources that I can use to learn about my relationships, my health, and my wealth.
When we get stuck on a false identity or a thing that isn’t even an identity and we call it/label it our identity, then we have to act that out. That’s who we are. When we separate feelings from our identity, we can look at it, examine it and use it. What is it about? What is our unconscious trying to tell our conscious so that we can thrive, so that we can overcome, so that we can be free, so that we can love one another, so that we can love ourselves.
I don’t love angry, I don’t love madness. I can learn from it, I can explore it, I can dig into it and grow from it. So put your identity in God, in Christ, in the Holy Spirit, and use the information you’ve been given to serve His Kingdom through that identity, to use the tools He’s given us to serve the Kingdom of God.
You be blessed!
